"I've got such a head-ache," complained Mrs. Murdock, one beautiful Saturday morning the week after Little Elizabeth had gone. "Likely it's a brain aneurysm. I'll be dead before the day is out."

She said this in a very commonplace way, as if she meant to say, "It will rain before nightfall," or "I'll have that beef roast for dinner." It was almost as if she wanted it to happen. She relished it. Well, Emily supposed, when you were as old as Mrs. Murdock--who had turned one-hundred years old that month--you must long for it at times. Already she had told Emily that she didn't have a friend in the world--her children and siblings had died long ago. Everyone she knew, it seemed, had died long ago.

"You have your grandchildren," said Emily. "I know Paul Philip and his wife are so happy that you've come to Shrewsbury to be with them."

"Paul Philip is a snivelling milk-toast and his wife is the fattest woman I've ever seen," said Mrs. Murdock. "They want my money--not me. I know exactly how it was when I wrote that I was coming--no, I didn't ask, I told. When you ask you run the risk of being refused. 'Oh,' Mrs. Paul probably said, 'Pa,' for that is what she calls him, 'Whatever will we do? October is the Exposition in Charlottetown. We won't be able to go with your old grandmother hanging around! Oh, and I did hope my dahlias would bring the first place prize!' 'Never mind,' says my grandson, Paul Philip, 'We'll get that Starr girl from New Moon to come up and sit with her. They're both as crazy as loons. They should get along well.'"

"Mrs. Murdock," laughed Emily. "You forget that I am the novelist! Why, you're almost as good as writing dialogue as I am."

"Well, I should be," said Mrs. Murdock. "I've had ten decades of listening to people yap their traps off. You might come over here and sit with me and talk, Mrs. Kent, since I'll be dead before sundown. So your husband is an artist?"

"Yes."

"Talented?"

"Yes--he is known as respected the world over."

"How strange he should have picked you--when he might have had so many beautiful girls," Mrs. Murdock murmured. "Not that you aren't pretty--there's something otherworldly about you. Those violet eyes! Are you an angel or an imp, Mrs. Kent?"

"A bit of both, I think," said Emily, with her slow, friendly smile. "But oh, Mrs. Murdock, won't you call me Emily? Mrs. Kent makes me feel dreadfully old--as if I was somebody's mother. I can't help thinking you mean Teddy's mother when you call me that."

"Aileen Kent was crazy as a cuckoo," said Mrs. Murdock. "Poor lunatic. Don't look so surprised, Emily--that is a pretty name. I grew up in the Tansy Patch myself--by way of Stovepipe Town--my Pa was poor. I worked as a hired girl for the Murrays--I was their your Grandfather Hugh was born, scrubbing the scullery floor. I never saw a more ill-tempered child. Always squalling. Heard he didn't improve much as a man. You look like him, when you knit your brows that way."

"So I've been told," said Emily.

"I've lived so long that anyone's forgotten I ever went out to work," Mrs. Murdock said, folding her hands over her bosom. "They've forgotten I exist. 'Maybelle Murdock?' they say. 'Why that old bat died ages ago!' Fools. My wits are sharp--I remember every story I'm ever told--every piece of gossip--it's all stored away up here."

"I bet you know many stories about the Murrays," said Emily, her eyes shining, and her writer's soul thrilling.

"I do," said Mrs. Murdock. "But I don't like to talk about a family like that. A family that's had so much trouble should be left on its own. They don't need anymore from me."

"You mean Cousin Jimmy, I suppose," said Emily with a sigh.

"Yes--Simple Jimmy Murray could have been a doctor--a writer--a philosopher! Until Elizabeth pushed him into that well. That's the saddest part--she's never forgiven herself--never will. She'll die without ever asking him for his forgiveness. And your ma was Juliet Murray, wasn't she? When she ran off they crossed through her name in the family Bible. All because she ran off to get married to man they didn't like! The Murrays at New Moon mourned her--as if she was buried instead of married. And then--there was that business with that little girl disappearing all those years and years ago."

Emily felt a pricking in her thumbs. "What little girl?" she asked.

"Cherice Murray? Carlotta? Some name like that."

"Do you mean Charlotte Murray?"

"Yes, that's it," said Mrs. Murdock, happily. "A sad business, that."

"Oh, Mrs. Murdock, will you tell me about it?" Emily begged, her hands clasped. 'It is a mystery at New Moon--none of us have any information on Charlotte Murray--there is just her little grave--that's all."

"It's not even her grave," said Mrs. Murdock. "She isn't buried there. They don't know what happened to Lost Charlotte--that's what they called her. She was fifty years older than me--or she would have been--and she wasn't a Murray by birth. The Murrays had a series of cabins built on their property before they planted the old orchard and one of the tenant's wives had a baby girl--and she died. The tenant went crazy--they had just been married--and hung himself from the rafter in their cabin when he found it. If your great-grandmother hadn't gone down to the cabin with a pot of stew for the new mother, she never would have found little Charlotte there, and the baby would have died. Imagine the scene--two dead people and a little live baby in that cramped cabin space. What a terrible sight. Mrs. Murray picked up the baby, which was days old, and it opened its eyes--and its eyes were the purest green she ever saw. None of that wishy-washy blue for this baby. She took it home with her. She wanted to name it Esme, for those green eyes, or Jade, but your great-grandfather wouldn't have it. He called it Charlotte, which was what his hunting dog had been called. That wasn't meant to be an insult--he loved that old dog. And they all loved Charlotte. Treated her just as their own.

"Charlotte grew up as proud as the proudest Murray that was ever born. When she was sixteen years old she wanted to marry James Perry, a Charlottetown boy. I remember his son well--I almost took him as my beau once. Your great-grandfather refused to let her. A Perry wasn't good enough for a Murray, he said. At which Charlotte exploded, 'But I'm NOT a Murray! And I don't want to be, if it means I can't marry James!' Your grandfather slapped her and told her that a Murray was the best thing in the world to be, and that she should be lucky he allowed her that honor, because her real folks were trash. Your grandfather loved that girl to the grave, but he was a hot-tempered man. Murrays had a reputation for temper."

"They still do," said Emily. "Oh, Mrs. Murdock, go on--what happened?"

"He erased her name from the Family Bible, and told her that if she wasn't proud to be a Murray she wasn't going to be one at all. When Charlotte saw what she'd done she left. And that's it. She left--and no one ever saw her again."

"She ran away?" asked Emily.

"Some think so. Some say she was tired of being cowed by the proud Murrays and went out to find her real family--there was some of them left in England. But most people believe that she took her father's dory out into the Shrewsbury pond and tried to row away downriver, to the Glen. One of her old schoolteachers lived there--perhaps she was running away to her. Anyway, the dory was found overturned the next morning. They dredged the pond after a few months, when no word had been heard from Charlotte."

"Did they--find--her?" Emily wondered.

"Yes. They found Lost Charlotte's body. It probably was her--but your great-grandparents wouldn't admit it. It was the body of another girl, they said, someone else. They would rather have her buried in a nameless, pauper's grave than to admit that their girl they loved so was dead. And then people would say that they saw a girl that looked like Lost Charlotte in Halilfax, or Boston, or Calgary, and it would get everyone's hopes up again. But she was dead. She had to be. She loved them too much to leave home forever. When your grandma and pa died, their children put up that stone in the old graveyard. Their parents would never let them do it. In memory only of Charlotte Murray--because her body isn't there."

"Mrs. Murdock," said Emily. "You are the only one in the world who remebers the story of Lost Charlotte."

"It's a sad story," said Mrs. Murdock. "No one was permitted to mention Lost Charlotte and it caused so much grief that they all tried to forget. It was well over a hundred years ago, anyway. Leaves a bad taste in my soul to think of such grief and loss. Now, Emily, girl, why don't you read me something out of that Rose book you brought--it's a good story, a happy story. I rather like hearing it--one of the only pleasures. Humour a dying woman and read to me, won't you, dear?"